Being Mr Wickham – Jermyn Street Theatre, London

Writer: Adrian Lukis

Director: Guy Unsworth

Adrian Lukis’ one-man show Being Mr Wickham has, like Jane Austen’s titular character from Pride and Prejudice, been on a peripatetic journey to some dubious places. Well, a sold-out New York run most recently and Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds back in 2021, but a reviewer like a dramatist needs some artistic licence. Now grey-haired, celebrating six decades, and settled into retirement with an unseen Lydia, Mr Wickham’s aim is to prove, over 60 drink-sodden minutes, why for so many years so many of us all have got him wrong.

“Am I to cast myself as the villain in my own story?” Wickham asks us. The answer is a resounding no. Whether you believe the self-described “brash, boorish, and vain” old gammon, which is what he has become, is quite as misunderstood as he claims comes down to your capacity for being taken in by charm. Lukis certainly gives an appealingly raffish performance but underneath this is the same attention-seeking, sadfishing, wicked old Wickham of old. Think an hour spent snuggled in a familiar armchair, eating reheated beef stew, watching Nigel Farage rehash a hodgepodge of familiar prejudices. Mildly comforting in its predictability, mellow even, but devoid of much novelty.

Lydia has stormed off to bed having taken offence at Wickham’s flirtatious philandering with a dance partner. There is a decanter of wine to be drunk and some self-exculpatory reminiscences to be aired. We hear how Wickham’s mother takes off with a guardsman leaving the young boy to grow up at Pemberley without money, “rank or position” but replete with charm. A lifelong antagonism is seeded when snobby Darcy gets to go to Eton while Wickham has to make do with a third-rate hack school in Devon. The school’s abusive headmaster receives grisly retribution later on in life.

Wickham grows up with an unquenchable lust for women and deep-seated admiration for Byron: “Women, boys, sodomy, incest; you think I’ve been bad?” he asks us. A failed sojourn as a vicar soon sees him join the army and fight at Waterloo. He can still smell the battlefield odour of “sulphur, blood and flesh”. A country posting sees him come into contact with the Bennets, whose matriarch offers up her daughters for marriage like “prize heifers at a country fair”. He calls his elopement to Brighton an act of “reckless goodwill towards Lydia”.

Wickham says he has always been “like a child in a room full of grown-ups”. Lukis plays him as a wry old chancer playing the hand life has dealt him as best he can. Self-serving yes and true to Austen’s character. But are there new insights here into what being Mr Wickham is actually like? Opinions will vary.

Runs until 22 June 2024